Appalling behaviour-dressed up as old age-it has to be addressed

[BlueLegume]

Hi all, having followed and contributed to several threads on ‘Elderly Parents’ I want to thank so many of you for helping me look at my/our situation. I won’t name check you just yet but you know who you are. This thread is not to be unpleasant about the elderly who are having a hard time. It is to address a very honest point that my parents have always been difficult. Impossible to discuss anything important with, always known better and having watched them alienate good decent people I am angry that they made no effort in life to do anything other than fun stuff for themselves and now expect me and my siblings to pick up their mess. It seems so many middle aged people have fallen foul of these ‘war babies’ as my mother still refers to her and Dad. Yes I accept they were born at the end of the war and they will have had to live in a post war country. For our mother that is all she talks about. She doesn’t accept they had the boom years post war which she has photo evidence of living it large in the 50s and 60s. She was an incredibly authoritarian mother yet after a few drinks would party all night. Always a case of do as I say not as I do. Now as I approach 60 I am wracked with worry and anxiety because she now ‘can’t cope’. It’s ruining life . I have all the therapy theories and have shared much of it. That said I am mad at the fact I am still dictated to or it feels so by her. Father is in a nursing home after a lot of denial that was what he needed. She will not have any help in the house so it is all falling to us. We are broken. My own family are fed up and rightly so. Selfish as it sounds I did not retire to look after a very unpleasant woman who has never liked me. I appreciate that sounds very bitter.

Giggling at the food. Crikey they ARE the same person! 😂

My Dad actually could cook but would only do it a few times a year.

Mum once told me she'd cooked nutritious, delicious food for four children. I didn't know who they were though.

😂😂😂

We had the same BS about cooking too.

I suppose it was more about impressing third parties than actually preparing proper food. Likewise, my mother had the luxury of not having to work and was incredibly lucky to marry my father who owned his house outright, giving her the opportunity to be patronising and sneery about ‘anyone who has a mortgage’
’I couldn’t sleep at night knowing I owed all that money for a house’! And to be incredibly judgemental of those that ‘clearly can’t handle their money’

Bloody pressure cooked watery stew. Night after night.

And yes, the delicate woman- I think it’s the manipulation. They ‘rescued’ these girls from their parents who didn’t understand them and were so cruel… and went on to protect and prioritise them for the rest of their lives.

Bloody tragic, when they become ill themselves and are neglected. DF took on a new lease of life when he was moved to the hospice. His recovery was so good, they were going to move him back out. Her behaviour was shocking.

@SensibleSigma this thread is spooky. Mine did the pressure cooked watery stew! Adding curry powder turned it into curry.

We also had a fair bit of frozen food too.

Mine couldn’t cook so it was burnt mince, burnt sausages, or eggs in various forms. The pressure cooker was used for a lot, mainly to produce watery cabbage and suchlike.

Once when I was expressing trepidation about hosting a large gathering including lots of cooking and guests staying for a long time, she was very impatient. ‘I’ve done it lots of times, I’m sure you’ll cope’!! Er, no… usually she didn’t cook at all for guests which was very embarrassing.

Yes! Everything was watery and tasted of nothing .. stew, shepherd's pie .. I was always glad when my dad cooked!

Spent the afternoon at my mum's, trying to have a conversation was hopeless, she just wasn't listening, just reminiscing about things I've heard a thousand times before and talking over me. I give up.

The regular was halved potatoes, whole carrots, a pint of water and a stick cube with a couple of oxtail rings or a small piece of mutton. It swam in the bowl.

A particular low was liver charred on the outside and raw on the inside, and another the bowl of soup with a raw egg cracked into it. Both when I was ill in bed. Dad commiserated with me, but there was nothing else 🤣

Lol did they all buy the same cookbook? My mother's idea of a stew was also potato, carrots, onion and a cheap cut of meat in water with 1 oxo stock cube. It was vile.
Things improved a little with the advent of chest freezers and frozen food. At least that only involved putting it in an oven and was a bit more edible.

That's how my mum made stew too, she might have added a bay leaf, but that's about it!

Where did they learn to make this stuff? The thought of those stews still makes me shudder.

Mine owned some jars of herbs and spices but I can't remember them being used and they must have been there for years without being replaced.

My mum's got herbs in her cupboard that expired before 2000! 😂

Post war rationing .... the "waste not, want not" mantra that went with it ..... this was the nature of these women's childhoods.
We are all subject to these childhood influences that stay throughout our lives.

It is amazing how many mumsnetters have such awful mothers!

But my mum mum was a decent cook. Eggs, pastry, a decent pie, kedgeree, curry, stew. She was briefly a cook at a country house.
That part of the family had a 'decent' war and aftermath.
I think the worst bit is the lack of delight in hospitality. I've been slaving over a hot stove, the aggressive oven cleaning on Xmas day. The reliance on convience food - loved anything reconstructed from powder. My mum could make a cup of tea and a biscuit have a bitter aftertaste.
I'd be tv gold on Bake Off, with my butterscotch angel delight slammed down in front of Pru.

We used to have awful Sunday soup that was cheap fatty meat swimming in water with a stock cube and badly chopped veg.

My older sibling at one point got my parents a big bag of turmeric, I'm not sure why. Then the soup was always yellow after that!

Limited food yes from rationing but it didn't need to be so revolting, badly cooked and flavourless.

I've just ticked the box for aggressive oven cleaning too. Done in a particularly martyrish way.

Snap with the vile and awful food. The curry was the same with curry powder and chopped banana, vile. Did anyone else have the vile chip pan. Blackened, full of black bits and hardened fat. Served burnt but raw in the middle.

Prides herself on being a fantastic cook. Always asks if eg to the custard is homemade, the pastry etc if I am cooking. I can cook fine, she can't. Then described said homemade food as "adequate" ffs

Omg. I came on here to ask if anyone else had night 2 of the stew except this time it was "curry", because a teaspoonful of curry powder was added and some chopped banana.

My mum is actually now suspicious of home made food. And also sees it as a mark of financial failure combined with disappointment that you have not forked out for an M&S lasagna.
So you'll produce a lovely dish using BBC Good Food, lovely cheese, decent Aberdeen Angus mince and she'll tell you all about the options available from various supermarkets, whilst picking through, saying she's not got much of an appetite.
It's all come to a peak though since she's been living on ready meals and biscuits, she has no gut biome and the side effects have been not nice.
I feel for the Doctors trying to get to the bottom of that one, she's had all the tests, told them her diet is nothing but salmon and veg. What she hasn't said is she has never eaten a yoghurt that wasn't irradiated and full of sugar and veg is frozen then nukked beyond recognition.

Sorry I forgot I already posted about the curry!

@HoraceGoesBonkers it is just uncanny isn't it. Vile watery curry, chopped uncooked banana and dessicated coconut. Just vile. The similarities with these women are insane, did they all go to a special school to learn to be horrible x

I think it’s prioritising self over guests/people who selfishly demand to be fed.

So being obliged to cook and feed others is a terrible imposition and done grudgingly.

DM still struggles with us eating when we visit. Makes such a fuss about. We’re in a no win situation, short of living on fresh air, nothing we do is acceptable 🤣

I'm amazed how many think of themselves as 'good cooks' - but the offerings are bloody horrible-

Mine used to chuck in some sultanas too to make it more exotic I guess.

The first time a boyfriend took me to an Indian restaurant (having been brought up to avoid all ‘foreign’ food as you don’t know what’s in it!) I truly had no idea that curry could also be savoury as well as sweet!

We didn't have the curry as "foreign food". See also rice. Pasta was very occasional and wasn't viewed as a proper meal (although tinned spaghetti hoops with toast was)!

It was endless boiled potatoes with meals. Occasionally mashed for some
variety, presumably.

@lexy70 Surely nobody else had dessicated coconut as a treat to add to a meal!

Mine was from a different country so was all sneery about indigenous food from the UK. You can't actually win.